The Last Letter from Juliet - Melanie Hudson Page 0,47
a covert operation.’
Utterly ridiculous.
‘Tell me Fenella, just a thought, but has Gerald usually had quite a bit of gin to drink by the time he canoes off into the moonlight.’
She shrugged.
‘He might have had the odd tipple, here and there. It is Christmas.’
I managed to yank the wetsuit over my left shoulder and wriggled around a bit in an attempt to persuade the whole thing to rest in a more comfortable position. ‘Ok, fine,’ I said. ‘But just leave the poor thing intact and I’ll take him with me. I’ll shake him as I paddle back.’
I put on the socks and wellies (I was pretty sure wellies and canoes didn’t usually mix, but I was well-past the point of caring) and five minutes later saw me ready for my mission and standing at the door with a life jacket over my shoulder and an elf under my arm, not quite an Attagirl, but not so very far off, I thought.
***
I was so right. Wellington boots do not mix well with a canoe. Not one bit. They were full of water by the twenty-metre point. The good news was that the moon was so full and so bright, I could easily see where I was going without the head torch and had harvested a bag of seaweed (the special kind my arse!) in less than half an hour.
We didn’t waste any time on pleasantries when I brought the canoe alongside the harbour wall and with a sudden outburst of Herculean strength, Fenella hiked the canoe and paddle out of the water, stowed it next to a gig boat and had grabbed the bag of seaweed out of my hand (with a swift backwards glance over her shoulder) before I had time to remove my life jacket. She dashed into the house leaving me to follow on behind. I walked into the kitchen to find a very large pot of water boiling on the Aga. She tipped the seaweed onto the kitchen table and took two pairs of scissors out of the drawer.
‘Get snipping,’ she said. ‘Small sections, like this …’
She cut a piece of seaweed roughly two inches square and held it up for me to examine. Seemed simple enough. A pile of freezer bags sat on the worktop. She grabbed one.
‘Put two pieces of seaweed into each bag, squash the air out of the bag, seal it and put the bag in the pot – we’ll weigh the bags down later with a tin of beans.’
‘How long do the bags stay in the pot?’
‘About twenty minutes,’ she said, already processing the seaweed like an automaton.
I put the scissors down and removed my life jacket.
‘Ok. Just give me minute to get changed,’ I said, moving towards my clothes that lay over a kitchen chair.
‘No time for that!’ She waved the scissors in my direction absently. ‘You’re fine as you are. Time’s money!’
Now, I didn’t know where the dear old lady I met that morning had gone, but she seemed to have been replaced by a mafia don. I took a stand by sitting down.
‘Well, at least give me time to get out of these wellies, Fenella.’ I began to remove my right boot. ‘My feet are like ice and I’m sorry, but my hands couldn’t actually hold a pair of scissors properly at the moment even if I tried. I’m frozen through.’
She put down her scissors and shuffled into the back room, reappearing almost immediately with a knock-off pair of Ugg boots and a gin bottle with Christmas Spirit written on the label.
‘Put them on then,’ she said, a little brusquely, I thought, ‘and stand by the Aga for a moment. But don’t heat up too quickly or you’ll get chilblains.’
My feet slipped into the wool-lined boots like they’d been given a first-class ticket to heaven – a really fluffy heaven. A heaven where little feathery angels fed you chocolate and selected the best programmes on Netflix while massaging your shoulders. Fenella put the bottle on the table.
‘Last year’s gin,’ she said with a wink (what was it about Fenella’s particular brand of gin that led everyone who drank it to wink) before filling a small pan with milk and placing it on the Aga top plate. ‘But first,’ she said, opening a cupboard and taking out a purple container with Cadbury written across it, ‘let’s get something warm inside you. Cream and a flake, do you?’